“You forgot the fact that there is yet no large scale recycling of the battery materials.”
Surprisingly, LiIon batteries don’t contain any toxic chemicals and is quite easy to recycle. I’ve visited a recycling site, it’s very large scale, highly automated and highly profitable (our tax is at work), something rich countries industry is still capable to do.
Redwood alone reportedly handles roughly 75–90% of lithium-ion battery recycling currently occurring in North America.
Most current feedstock is still:
battery factory scrap,
damaged packs,
consumer electronics,
and early EV retirements.
The above is from Chat GPT
The amount of new lithium ion batteries sold annually in the USA is on the order of 500,000 to 1,000,000 metric tons. Redwood processes in the tens of thousands of metric ton of the above waste streams and they are about 90% of the market. I won’t even go into the ICE vehicle waste stream as the numbers are exponentially greater.